Call-in radio and television talk shows often provide a telephone number or email address through which listeners or viewers can contact the show (e.g., to talk to the show's host while the show is on the air). Radio call-in shows typically provide the call-in telephone number by announcing it over the air. If an audience member does not hear the telephone number, e.g., because the audience member tuned into the show already in progress, then the audience member cannot call in to the show. In addition, telephone numbers are often spoken very fast, leading to the possibility that a listener may not be able to write down the number, especially while driving a car or when the listener's eyes and/or hands are busy.
Even when an audience member does call a show, the audience member must often redial the number many times before getting through due to high volumes of calls being placed to the call-in number at the same time. When the audience member does get through, the call is often placed in a long queue, and the audience member must then wait for long periods of time before speaking to an operator or other person(s) handling incoming telephone calls, because the show's host rarely handles incoming calls.
Call-in programs often use commercial or third party call centers to handle and/or screen incoming telephone calls. The call center typically must employ many paid operators who each answer calls, screen callers for appropriate subject matter and/or applicability of the caller to the show's theme or subject matter.
One known partial solution to the above problems is to store the telephone number for the call-in program in the mobile terminal's memory or phonebook. The user can then dial the number by recalling the number from the phonebook. However, recalling a telephone number from memory can be tedious as the user navigates through the phonebook using the keys on the mobile terminal. Alternatively, the user may store the telephone number in voice selectable memory, and dial the number by speaking a name associated with the stored telephone number. This does not, however, alleviate all the problems recited above. The user must still remember the phone number long enough to enter it into the phonebook. In addition, the same shows often use different telephone numbers each day.
Thus, it would be an advancement in the art to provide a method and system that audience members could use to call in to a call-in show without being required to receive and/or remember a telephone number. It would be a further advancement in the art to provide an automated system for receiving calls from audience members, and to handle the calls with little human assistance.